It looks like it has a PowerVR GPU, which would make it the later. If you want a board where you can write your own OS and still make use of the GPU, the Raspberry Pi is your best bet.
back
1 comments
Note that I think this is only an issue if you want 3D acceleration - I believe that unlike on the Pi, modesetting is open source and possibly even documented, so you should be able to turn on the display output and set up a framebuffer you can write to without touching any of the proprietary bits.
The Pi works differently from other computers I've seen, in that the GPU is responsible for booting the system, and so it always needs the binary blob to start. Think of it as the equivalent of the BIOS on a PC, except it runs on the GPU instead of the CPU, and it's stored on an SD card instead of ROM. But as far as your own OS is concerned, how you communicate with it if fully documented. So you can do modesetting, and you can do hardware acceleration and whatnot. I believe the only thing you can't do on non-linux OSes is video decoding, but I'm not exactly sure.
> The Pi works differently from other computers I've seen, in that the GPU is responsible for booting the system, and soit always needs the binary blob to start.
This is common in the ARM world, where there isn't a standard like the "PC standard" on x86 world. Many ARM SoC's have a "bootstrap" core, which is a low power ARM core. All ARM computers boot differently.